The UK's electronic eavesdropping and security agency, GCHQ, has been secretly gathering intelligence from the world's biggest internet companies through a covertly run operation set up by America's top spy agency, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal.

The documents show that GCHQ, based in Cheltenham, has had access to the system since at least June 2010, and generated 197 intelligence reports from it last year.

The US-run programme, called Prism, would appear to allow GCHQ to circumvent the formal legal process required to seek personal material such as emails, photos and videos from an internet company based outside the UK.

The use of Prism raises ethical and legal issues about such direct access to potentially millions of internet users, as well as questions about which British ministers knew of the programme.

MOSCOW, June 7 (RIA Novosti) - Western support for Syria’s armed opposition will only fuel violence in the war-torn country, Russia’s foreign minister insisted on Friday.

“We are disturbed by statements coming from leaders of the so-called Free Syrian Army as well as from some US representatives, to the effect that support for the armed opposition will continue in order to restore the military balance on the ground,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said. “That is a road to nowhere.”

President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday Russia was disappointed by the European Union’s decision last week to end the embargo on arms supplies to Syria.

Supplying arms to the opposition is a continuation of “the vicious circle of violence,” Lavrov said.

Mr Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, released an unusual late-night statement in response to the leak of a secret court order which shows the US is storing information on millions of calls made by Americans each day.

Mr Clapper accused The Guardian of giving a "misleading impression" of how the programme worked and said he had ordered parts of it to be declassified so Americans would understand "the limits of this targeted counterterrorism programme and the principles that govern its use".

He insisted the programme was authorised under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and targeted only "non-US persons" outside the United States, admitting the US had accessed the servers of internet companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple to spy on foreigners.

A suicide bomber rammed his car into a bus carrying Iranian Shi'ite pilgrims in Iraq on Friday, killing at least nine people in an attack likely carried out by Sunni insurgents trying to ignite sectarian conflict.

Al Qaeda's local wing and other Sunni insurgents have unleashed a wave of attacks since the start of the year in an attempt to provoke the kind of Shi'ite against Sunni bloodshed that killed thousands in 2006-2007.

Police said during Friday's attack in Muqdadiya, 80 km northeast of Baghdad, the bomber targeted a group of Iranian pilgrims who often visit Iraq's Shi'ite shrines.

SWAT team members engaged actors and police officers pretending to be terrorists during a live counter terrorism demonstration for the 2013 National Homeland Security Conference, on the streets of downtown L.A. on Thursday. Spectators gathered to watch as an actor pretended to detonate a suicide vest and SWAT team members and pretend terrorists shot at each other.

(from top row left to right) Jewel Uddin, Mohammed Saud, Zohaib Ahmed, and (bottom row left to right)
Anzal Hussain, Mohammed Hasseen, Omar Khan. The six Islamic extremists will be sentenced today for planning a murderous attack on an English Defence League rally.The extremists wanted to 'execute a terrible vengeance' on the far-Right group for its 'blasphemous words and actions' against Islam.

A council has been fined £150,000 for losing unencrypted laptops containing personal data and bank account details of more than 20,000 people.

Two computers were stolen from Glasgow City Council premises in a breach of the Data Protection Act.

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), which issued the fine, found that the building was insecure because it was being refurbished and there had previously been complaints about a lack of security.

A 66-year-old New Mexico cruise ship passenger was killed when a small sightseeing plane in southeast Alaska crashed on the side of a steep mountain, Alaska State Troopers said Wednesday.

Thomas L. Rising of Santa Fe was among seven people aboard the Pacific Wings de Havilland Canada DHC-2 Beaver that went down near the town of Petersburg on Tuesday. The other five passengers aboard the single-engine floatplane were members of the same family and also traveling on the same National Geographic cruise ship, according to Clint Johnson, head of the National Transportation Safety Board's Alaska regional office. He didn't know the family's hometown or age range.

Thirteen people are being treated for rabies exposure after a family found a baby raccoon and brought it inside its home, state officials in Rhode Island said Thursday.

The state Department of Environmental Management said the animal was picked up May 29, near the Scituate line. Coventry Animal Control said the raccoon was not injured, but was too young to be away from its mother. It later tested positive for rabies.

Gail Mastrati, a department spokeswoman, said 11 people from Rhode Island and two from Connecticut who came into contact with the animal are being treated for rabies exposure. Two of them are under 18.

One child has died and nearly 80 others have been affected by an outbreak of acute respiratory infection, in some cases complicated by meningitis, in Rostov-on-Don.

Twenty-eight children from the Teremok kindergarten are currently in hospital, 11 with symptoms of pneumonia and nine with meningitis. One child died yesterday despite receiving medical treatment, ITAR-TASS reported Thursday.

A group of specialists from the Research and Development Institute for Childhood Infections will today fly to Rostov-on-Don, about 1,000 kilometers south of Moscow, to assist local pediatricians who are treating the children.

"All of the children have been examined by specialists from the Department of Pediatric Infectious Diseases Medical University and bacteriological and virological blood tests have been carried out," the regional Health Ministry said, adding that there is no meningitis epidemic in the region.

The Coast Guard, Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, City of Valdez, and Gallagher Marine Services, LLC formally established a Unified Command on Wednesday in response to container oil leaks aboard the cargo ship BBC Arizona.

The Unified Command structure brings together representatives of all major organizations involved in an incident in order to coordinate an effective response while at the same time carrying out their own jurisdictional responsibilities. Under the Unified Command, various governmental agencies and non-governmental responders may blend together throughout the operation to create an integrated response team.

“Response to the ship’s container leaks has been a close collaboration between ADEC, the Port of Valdez, BBC Arizona representatives, and the Coast Guard since the start of the incident,” said Lt. Roberto Trevino, Federal On-scene Coordinator Representative. “Establishing a Unified Command allows those involved to build on established partnerships and provides a formal forum for all involved to make consensus, collaborative response decisions.”

ISTANBUL AND ANTAKYA − Burcin Altensai, an architect from Istanbul, wandered around Gezi Park in Taksim Square on Monday afternoon, watching the tens of thousands thronging the area, doing folk dances and eating picnics on the grass, with a worried smile on her face. For the last year, Altensai has been a member of a small group of academics and environmental activists fighting the government’s plan to build on the park a shopping center in a faux-Ottoman building. Yes, of course she is happy that their tiny group spawned a national movement sweeping dozens of cities in Turkey, and calling upon democratically elected Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to change his authoritarian ways, but she is also sad.

“We had to tell Erdogan that you can’t force things on people,” she says. “But there has been so much needless violence, and I am worried there will be more.”

Disclosure of the massive surveillance of phone records and internet communications risks “long-lasting and irreversible harm” to US national security, the director of national intelligence says.

Late on Thursday night US time James Clapper issued a bullet-point defence of the surveillance programs disclosed by the Guardian and the Washington Post, saying they contained “numerous safeguards that protect privacy and civil liberties”. To correct the “misleading impression left in the article” – apparently a reference to the Guardian’s original story – Clapper said he approved the declassification of his defence of the National Security Agency’s collection of every phone record from millions of Verizon customers.

“There is a robust legal regime in place governing all activities conducted pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act” Clapper wrote, “which ensures that those activities comply with the Constitution and laws and appropriately protect privacy and civil liberties. The program at issue here is conducted under authority granted by Congress and is authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). By statute, the Court is empowered to determine the legality of the program."

Secretary of State John Kerry quietly acted last month to give Egypt $1.3 billion in U.S. military aid, deciding that this was in the national interest despite Egypt's failure to meet democracy standards.

Kerry made the decision well before an Egyptian court this week convicted 43 democracy workers, including 16 Americans, in what the United States regards as a politically motivated case against pro-democracy non-governmental organizations.

Rights groups believe Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi is retreating from democratic freedoms, notably in a new civil society law and in proposals for judicial reform that critics see as a way to purge judges perceived as hostile to the government.

Despite stating in a May 9 memo that "we are not satisfied with the extent of Egypt's progress and are pressing for a more inclusive democratic process and the strengthening of key democratic institutions," Kerry said the aid should go forward.

Major tech companies including Apple Inc, Google and Facebook Inc on Thursday said they do not provide any government agency with "direct access" to their servers, contradicting a Washington Post report that they have granted such access under a classified data collection program.

The newspaper reported that the U.S. National Security Agency and the FBI are "tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies" through a secret program known as PRISM, and extracting massive amounts of data including audio, video, photographs, emails, documents and connection logs.

It named nine companies, including Apple, Facebook, Microsoft Corp and Google Inc, as having joined the secret program.

U.S. ally Jordan threatened on Thursday to expel Syria's ambassador after he warned the kingdom that Syrian missiles could be used against Patriot batteries due to be deployed soon along their border.

Foreign Minister Nasser Joudeh told state news agency Petra that Ambassador Bahjat Suleiman, a former general and intelligence chief who is a member of President Bashar al-Assad's minority Alawite sect's ruling inner circle, had violated diplomatic protocol.

"The Syrian ambassador has breached all norms and diplomatic practices by his behavior ... This is considered as a final warning to abide by the rules of diplomatic practice and to stop any meetings or statements that are deemed harmful to Jordan,' Joudeh said.

Austria said on Thursday it would pull out of a U.N. force on the Golan Heights after battles between Syrian troops and rebels there, in a blow to a mission that has kept the Israeli-Syrian war front quiet for 40 years.

Israel, anxious for the international mission to remain in place, worried that the Golan could become a springboard for attacks on Israelis by Islamist militants fighting to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

"While appreciating Austria's longtime contribution and commitment to peacekeeping in the Middle East, we nevertheless regret this decision and hope that it will not be conducive to further escalation in the region," the Israeli Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

KASTELORIZO, Greece - When George Papandreou declared Greece was effectively bankrupt in April 2010, the former prime minister chose to do so standing by the sparkling harbor waters of Kastelorizo, a remote Aegean island. It has turned out to be a fitting backdrop.

This speck at the easternmost corner of Europe has become a symbol of Greece's struggle to confront old ills and build a better future. The country's economic crisis has spurred inhabitants of the island, population 350, to challenge the political elite that ruled Kastelorizo for 18 years.

In recent months complaints about widespread graft and poor infrastructure - flaws many observers say led to Greece's general collapse after decades of foreign-fed affluence - have boiled over. The island's mayor, Pavlos Panigyris, has been suspended by Greece's general secretary for the Aegean region, pending trial later this year on criminal charges of corruption brought by a public prosecutor.

Beijing has upped the ante on the US over accusations of cyber attacks by China, warning that it also has evidence against the US before a meeting between Barack Obama and Xi Jinping this week.

China Daily said cyber attacks from the US had been "as grave as the ones the US claims China has conducted", and quoted a senior cyber security official as calling on Washington not to openly press Beijing over cyber attacks.

The warning comes as Mr Obama is under pressure to do just that at his first presidential summit with Mr Xi at the Annenberg Estate in California on Friday.

The German city of Dresden waited anxiously Thursday to see if the swollen River Elbe, which has brought misery to thousands in the Czech Republic, would breach its flood defenses.

The river is expected to crest in Dresden late Thursday or early Friday. It is running at about 8.5 meters, compared with a normal average of 2 meters, and is likely to reach about 9 meters (30 feet) when the flow peaks.

Tropical Storm Andrea is expected to drench the East Coast with heavy rains Friday as its strength weakens.

A broader swath of the East Coast -- including parts of 13 states, from Georgia to Maine -- is under flash-flood watches. Flash flood warnings extend from Florida through coastal communities north to Virginia.

The warning means a sudden deluge of rain could overwhelm sewers, and cause rivers and creeks to overrun their banks through the weekend.

Deteriorating security conditions near the Golan Heights headquarters for U.N. peacekeepers in the region has prompted Austria to say it will pull out its 370 troops, more than a third of the force assigned to help keep Israel and Syria at bay.

The announcement came amid fierce fighting over the Quneitra crossing, Syria's only access point to the Golan Heights. Rebel forces first captured but then lost control of the crossing in heavy fighting.

Syrian tanks crossed into a demilitarized zone near the crossing, Israel complained to the United Nations, and two U.N. peacekeepers were wounded when an errant mortar round fell on their border camp.

If it were not for the powerful stench and desperate shouts emanating from the wire cages, the men sitting in rows, each wearing a white skull cap, look like they could be at a prayer meeting.

But for the 276 Rohingya men sitting on the floor of two cells designed to hold just 15 people each, their situation is about as far away from a mosque as it gets -- that was the scene, vividly described and shown in an a report by British news network and CNN affiliate, Channel 4.

Appearing to have barely enough room to sit, some of the men reportedly had swollen feet and withered leg muscles from a lack of exercise and had not moved from the cage in five months.

That's the question politicians in Washington, and millions of citizens around the United States, asked Thursday thanks to a jolting report suggesting the government has been collecting millions of Americans' phone records.

FBI Direct Robert Mueller will be asked about the matter -- revealed after a British newspaper, the Guardian, published a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court order that applied to phone data from Verizon -- when he appears next week before the House Judiciary Committee. The panel's chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Virginia, issued a statement Thursday saying he was "very concerned that the Department of Justice may have abused the intent of the law, and we will investigate."

America's top intelligence official on Thursday night challenged news reports claiming Facebook posts, Gmail messages and more have been intercepted for years in a vast data-mining operation, saying the reports "contain numerous inaccuracies."

The Guardian, a British newspaper, and the Washington Post reported Thursday that U.S. intelligence agencies had access to the central servers of nine of the country's biggest technology firms including Microsoft, Apple, Google, Yahoo and Facebook.

The Post reported the program -- called PRISM -- underwent "exponential growth" since its founding in 2007. In fact, the newspaper said the program has become the leading source of raw material for the National Security Agency, the secretive U.S. intelligence operation that monitors electronic communications.

Yet several tech giants whose servers were reportedly ensnared in the program denied any knowledge of it Thursday.

From the Parade Ground to the playground, square bashing to square roots, the Government is trying to get former soldiers sailors, airmen and women and marines fast-tracked into the teaching profession.

The idea - pioneered in the US - is aimed at capitalising on the skills and values learned in the military and transferring them into the classroom.

The scheme being launched in the UK later is called Troops to Teachers and the real beneficiaries, according to the Department for Education, will be those ex-servicemen and women who do not already have a university education.

Anyone cautioned or prosecuted for offences involving indecent images of children in the future will be banned from teaching, the Department for Education has warned.

The announcement was made as Education Secretary Michael Gove comes under pressure to explain why his department approved a decision to allow a teacher who downloaded indecent images of children back into the classroom.

The move sparked widespread condemnation and Mr Gove has now been urged to appear in the Commons to tell MPs why Geoffrey Bettley, 36, was reinstated after police found nearly 200 child abuse images on his computer.

North Korea said it would reopen a Red Cross hotline with South Korea on Friday and invited officials from Seoul to talks over the weekend, a further sign Pyongyang wants to improve ties after a barrage of threats to wage war earlier this year.

On Thursday, North Korea proposed talks to normalize commercial projects, including a joint industrial zone it shut down at the height of tensions in early April.

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan told thousands of cheering supporters on Friday his authority came from the ballot box and urged them not to be drawn into violence, in a show of ruling party strength after a week of fierce anti-government protests.

Addressing crowds at Istanbul airport from an open-top bus after returning from a trip to North Africa, Erdogan called on his ruling party faithful to show restraint and distance themselves from "dirty games" and "lawless protests".

Turkey has been rocked by its worst political unrest for decades over the past week, as anti-government riots dented Erdogan's authority, sullied the country's image abroad and highlighted concerns about human rights and freedom of speech in the EU candidate nation.

Facebook Inc said Thursday it does not provide any government agency with "direct access" to its servers, denying a central element of a Washington Post report.

The Post reported on Thursday that the U.S. National Security Agency and the FBI are "tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies" through a highly classified program known as PRISM, extracting audio, video, photographs, emails, documents and connection logs.

"We do not provide any government organization with direct access to Facebook servers," Facebook Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan said in a statement. "When Facebook is asked for data or information about specific individuals, we carefully scrutinize any such request for compliance with all applicable laws, and provide information only to the extent required by law."

They marched him to the toilets of a nearby Debenhams where they carried out a "sustained attack" on him.

Wilson-Fletcher, of Oldham Street, Manchester, and El Janabi, of Artillery Court, Ardwick, Manchester, were convicted by a jury of two counts of rape and two counts of sexual assault following a nine-day trial in April.

El Janabi, a former intelligence officer in Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime, was jailed for 15 years.